Hunters Walks

Hunters Walks Series 2
A series of 15 caches on a circular walk of 4.5 miles in Fairfield near Bromsgrove.

Had to stay fairly close to home as Mark was on call-out, so thought we'd head over to Bromsgrove to do the Hunters Walk series. Parked at the recreation ground in Fairfield and set off in the snow. A great day to be out caching, frosty and sunny!

Fairfield Recreation Ground

Decided to start at Walk 15 as it was the closest one, then continued the long way around the football field and out onto the road towards Walk 1.

Starting off

It was unclear where the path should go after #4 and some of the previous logs had mentioned taking a short cut due to cattle so we headed around the field and out onto the road to hopefully avoid the field of cows.

Between Walk 4 & Walk 5

Some of the walk takes you through Pepper Wood, a very pretty area cared for by the Woodland Trust. Pepper Wood is a remnant of the historic Forest of Feckenham, dating back to the 13th century. The wood was quite busy with muggle walkers and we also met fellow cachers 'Hyperion Hawks' and 'Stephen and Alex'.

Pepper Wood

The rain had frozen and the lanes were like ice rinks

All in all a fab walk completed in 2hrs 48mins with a good range of hides and sizes.

Yistrang & Urban Meets Rural Series

Yistrang
A series of 8 caches and a bonus on a 2.3 mile walk around Ilshaw Heath.

Parked up near the bakery in Ilshaw Heath and couldn't resist popping in for essential caching supplies before starting off on our walk.

Yum!

A pleasant walk along part of the Birmingham to Stratford-upon-Avon Canal and countryside around Illshaw Heath.

Frozen Canal

Completed the series in 1 hour 22 mins so decided to head off and do the Urban Meets Rural series in Birmingham.

Urban Meets Rural

A series of 20 caches on a 6.8 mile walk, set on the Northern Stratford Canal, taking in a walk along a Nature reserve and a section of the river Cole .

We set off at 13:37 thinking it was only a 5 mile walk and would finish easily before dark.

Brandwood Tunnel

A very enjoyable walk on a very cold day, the canals were all frozen over.

Ducks on Ice

Completed the walk in the dark, took us 3 hours 10 mins with only 1 DNF which we will return to find in the daylight next time we're in the area.

A Frozen Trittiford Mill Pool, Yardley Wood

Ducks and er..... bricks?

Time to go home

An icy walk in Cookhill

A Snowy Day

HTC Quadway

We needed a cache today for our stats grid only time for one and this was fairly close to home and looked like a nice walk for Poppy & Whisper. Parked up in a very icy Cladswell Lane and headed over the stile. Some ponies approached as we walked across the field, they seemed friendly enough so we continued, I think they thought we had pocketfuls of treats because as I got my camera out they quickened their pace towards us :D. Searched for a good 5 mins or so and thought the name might be a clue to the hide but then I spotted some footprints, thinking that they may be cacher's footprints, hey presto there was the cache in a place we weren't expecting and the last entry was dated 27th November......

The Lickeys in the Snow

The Lickeys in the Snow

A spur of the moment decision to head over to the Lickeys today. We wanted to do the new Sculptured Wherigo and thought we'd also find the next Blindmouse puzzle that we'd solved. It's very time consuming, solving them then finding the time to drive over to find them and pick up the next lot of information. We'll get there in the end. We're having great fun doing them and we appreciate the time that must've gone into setting them all up.

Whisper & Poppy looking for Charles Edghill

Really enjoyed doing Sculptured, a lovely walk around the Lickeys that was like a winter wonderland today with all the snow everywhere, hardly anyone around and it took us to some areas that we don't remember having been to before.

We completed it on both the Oregon and the Mio, all the zones were found easily although on the Oregon it was more difficult to see which way to go because until you were less than 500ft it only shows as miles to 1 decimal place whereas the Mio shows to 2 decimals places, this is of course an oddity of the player and not an error with this particular cache.

We found the final cache easily and were really pleased to see a FTF prize, it was DaftHead's Ted which we immediately named 'Daft Ted', we have been given strict instructions to give this bear lots of cuddles and a good home - no problem :D

Daft Ted needs lots of cuddles!

We completed it in about 1½ hours and by the time we finished it was snowing quite heavily so glad to get back to the car for a cuppa.

Dead End Dash # 2

Dead End Dash #2

We needed to find a cache today to fill the 30th November square today and this one fitted the bill very nicely! ;-)

The Postman's Walk

The Postman's Walk

Inquisitive Alpacas

Just as we set off our caching friends Sumadartson drove past, they were just about to start the walk so we waited for them to catch us up. The first field had alpacas and cows in, we were a little concerned to start with as we had Poppy & Whisper with us but luckily they didn't take much notice of us and stayed away. A bit of a chilly start but we soon warmed up once we got going.

We were lucky enough to meet Flo, the Gnome-ad's dog, she was really friendly and we noticed she was also trackable!

Whisper & Poppy make friends with Flo

A very enjoyable series in great company - 8 caches and a bonus over approximately 3 miles.

with Sumadartson at the final

On our way home we made a slight detour to the lovely little village of Pebworth to do Where's the water tower ,a straightforward little multi at the church.

That was all we had time for today, now home to a nice warm house and a cuppa :D

An Arboreal Adventure and 5 FTFs

We had planned to go to an event in the Brecon Beacons today, a 9 mile walk around Pen Y Fan, alarms set for 4am and we were ready to leave the house by 5am but then it started to snow and was covering the road outside quite quickly, we set off, our local roads were quite slippery but we thought once we got out to the main A46 dual carriageway the roads would be gritted, wrongo, the roads were treacherous and hadn't been gritted and just seemed to be getting worse the further we travelled so after about 6 miles we decided to turn around and head back home *sigh*

Too snowy!-

Decided to stay a bit closer to home and head out Stourbridge way instead where some new caches had been published last night. Stopped off in Churchill village to do a quick cache and dash at the village pound, we've seen a few of these since we started caching, interesting little spot.

Impounded tree...

Churchill Pound

The Arboreal Adventure series consists of four Multis and a bonus cache. Although the bonus is listed as a Puzzle/Mystery, it is infact a Multi because co-ords for all the required waypoints are listed on the cache page itself and there is no need to actually find the four other caches if you don't have a head for heights!

Frosty

At first it looked a bit complicated as to which order to do the caches but it soon came together.

One of the way points had us stumped for while so after a prolonged search we contacted the CO who reassured us that no climbing was required for the stages.

Sunny now!

Apart from number 3, all the final locations were easily located. This one took a bit of detective work looking for signs of branches having been stood on as the cache was situated a lot higher up than expected

View from Number 3!

Nice array of fungi at number 2

Whisper wasn't at all sure about the gravity defying antics

The bonus cache was hidden in a totally different type of location but still required some climbing. ;-)

All in all an enjoyable set of caches in a lovely woodland setting.